I haven't posted much lately due to The Juggle.

Anyone with young children who also works or does other things ... and has a spouse who travels for work or is otherwise absent ... is acutely familiar with The Juggle. Over the last year and a half I like to think I became quite competent at it. You have one ball in the air while launching a second and catching a third. You get the kids to bed early and then look over some work while cooking for the next day and chatting long distance to your husband who is in Korea. No biggie.

However, since our move in August, The Juggle has started to resemble more of a Cirque de Soleil act, in which James and I are each standing on one foot on a giant rolling ball, tossing flaming batons back and forth while supporting midgets standing on a special shoulder-mounted brace. And the ball is on a narrow plank above a deep tank of water. A tilted plank.

You could call it a kind of Ultra Juggle. Ultra Juggle makes you realize how easy you had it when you could get all your errands done in your own car with a 8-minute stop at University Village. Instead of over 4 days, 3 subway trips, and 9 taxi rides, some in flash flood conditions that no sane person would drive in back home. (That was today.)

Under The Juggle, I could wake up around 7:45 and get the kids to school pretty much on time (9 a.m.). Under Ultra Juggle, James and I both need to wake up at 5 a.m., him to work at home for 1 hour to catch the tail end of the working day in Seattle, and me to take care of the dog, everyone's breakfast, and myself in order to have my game on when the kids wake up around 6:30. They need to be at the bus stop on our compound by 7:30. This doesn't sound so hard except they need not just their sunny morning selves (ha) every morning but: clean and pressed uniforms, regulation white or grey socks, parent-teacher communication notebook written in, lunch packed, water bottle filled with distilled water, library book in separate library bag to be returned if it's the right day, sunscreen, hat, and more. I also need to put calamine on their various mosquito bites, which are atrocious and continue to make them look flea-bitten and disreputable.

Our ayi, who I will call Ying C. in this blog, helps a lot. She does most of the laundry and preps veggies and fruit for the kids' lunches the afternoon before. But it's still me that needs to pull all this stuff together in the mornings.

Once the kids and James are launched - he usually walks them to the bus stop and then leaves - I have a precious hour to myself, which I can spend working on house stuff (we're unpacked but still not totally organized). At 8:30 I meet a neighbor who is in my Chinese class and she and I share a taxi to school (10 mins.) I am in Chinese class from 9 to noon. Which I realize is my own choice (making my own tuna fish sandwich, as in the story I always like to tell). But I am learning a lot and it is making all of our lives here more manageable. It is really neat to suddenly understand something that I have been hearing all along - this happens about every day or two. Last week I was in the fancy western supermarket and saw two large rats in the beverage aisle. I was excited to realize that I almost knew how to tell the management - I knew how to say, "Excuse me, you have two large [somethings] here. They ran under there, and under there." Unfortunately I didn't know the word for rat. For the record, it's da4 shu3 (the numbers indicate tones, so "da" is said in a falling tone and "shu" in a falling then rising tone). I didn't feel up for the charades that would be involved in communicating the missing word, so I just continued on with my shopping.

I am also working as an OT two afternoons a week. This may sound like a lot, but I have really tightly circumscribed it - I see clients from 12:30-3:30 on Tues. and Thurs. The kids get home at 3:45 (Ying meets them at the bus on those days and I get home close on their heels).

To make the early morning stuff work, the kids need a very early dinner and bedtime. We eat around 5 without James but save his dinner for when he gets home. The kids start to head to bed around 7 and are usually out by 8 p.m. Of course, that is my chance to ... get things ready for them to go to school the next day!

This probably doesn't sound so overwhelming. Just a long school day with a lot of prep work involved. But everything else here takes 2-4x as long as it would in the U.S. So that eats up whatever flex time there would normally be in a schedule like this. Plus there are factors that you just don't have to consider in the U.S. Tonight I steamed carrot sticks for the kids and when I took them out of the pot, I set the steamer (on its feet) in the sink. Then I started to rinse a dish on the other side of the sink but a big gout of tap water hit all the carrots. We just installed a reverse osmosis filter on the kitchen sink but it's only on the left side, not the main tap. The water in this city is visibly dirty and contains high levels of pesticides, heavy metals (lead, arsenic, etc.), and bacteria. I had personally just finished my second bout of severe Expat Tummy and suspect restaurant salads - with vegetables most likely washed in tap water - as the culprit. But these carrots were the only vegetable I had for the kids for the night.

What would you do? I rinsed the carrots with boiling clean water from the teakettle and fed them to the dog (sorry, Zoey). The kids had rice and salmon and cut up oranges for dinner. I put on extra sesame sprinkles. Sesame's a kind of a vegetable, right? Right?

The kids' favorite things about Shanghai:
* Lego class (Children's Technology Workshop)
* Kidtown
* The Pearl TV Tower
* Cruising on tour boats on the Huangpu River
* Tourist monorail ride under the river, complete with bizarre light show
* Receiving allowance, which we started after they got here
* Chinese fruit gummy candies, which they can afford on their allowance
* The Mama Store, which opens at the end of the day on which they get their allowance - James and I keep this stocked up with small, safe alternative purchases after the kids insisted on buying some very suspect toys that looked like they were made of lead + coloring + glitter.
* Their pets (we are down one turtle now, but Tuck still has Mr. Climby, and Emi just added two small goldfish, Zippy and Zoomy, to the turtle tank).



My favorite things (a somewhat shorter list):
* My personal cards and our family's cards, designed and printed by the woman behind Paper Tiger
* A painting we've been thinking about buying and should bring home tomorrow - a Chinese woman in red army uniform making a cat's cradle star. It's not high art and is probably a knockoff of someone else's work but James and I both find it oddly compelling.
* This very fabulous freshly made, thick French yogurt that is delivered to our house weekly (in glass bottles) for less per container than a packaged cup of Dannon in the U.S.
* Learning Chinese.

Hmm, I wonder if I could pack some of the yogurt as my morning snack for class and thereby combine two of my favorite things here. OK, I'll conclude this note now because it's quite late, and I still haven't finish packing the kids' backpacks for school tomorrow...